Dot Day 2019

Every year, one of the highlights in our school library is participating in International Dot Day!  Dot Day, which is celebrated on September 15ish, is based on the book The Dot and is a celebration of creativity and making a difference in the world.

Each year, we begin by reading the book.  Then, different grade levels had an opportunity to express their creativity in a variety of ways.

Our Kindergarten and first grade students colored a dot on a special sheet of paper from QuiverVision.  After coloring their dots, the students got to see their dots "come to life" using the free QuiverVision Augmented Reality app!  The students were so amazed and excited!  They even figured out how to "pin" their dot so they could walk around the room and see their dot in different locations.  It was so much fun watching the students full of wonderment!

After reading the book, our third grade students had an opportunity to code a dot using Scratch. Our students use Scratch with our Code to the Future program but this time they had more freedom and could experiment with different features.

In fourth grade, the students colored a dot and then used a mini green screen to create "wormholes".  We used the green screen feature in iMovie for the first time (we've always used Do Ink in the past).  It was quite a process and not all of the students finished but you can see some of their cool projects on our Flipgrid board.  Directions and inspiration for this project came from this amazing blog post.

Second grade did not participate this year because we were busy creating introduction videos to send to our Global Read Aloud partners in Canada.  More to come on this next month!

Library Genre Scavenger Fliphunt

This week, our fourth grade students participated in an active, collaborative activity in the library that was so much fun...a library genre scavenger Fliphunt!  With this activity, I wanted students to learn about different fictional genres, where the different genres are in our library, and how to tell what genre a book might be.



The books in the fiction section of our library are arranged by genre.  For example, all of the realistic fiction books are together, all of the fantasy books are together, etc and it's important for students to learn about the different literary genres.  By fourth grade, the students are mostly familiar with the genres so to demonstrate their understanding, they recorded videos using Flipgrid.

 

First, the students were placed in groups of 2-3 and each group had to find the different Fliphunt task sheets.  There were six different tasks and each one was in a different section of the genres.  Students had to read the task and then record a video on Flipgrid showing their understanding.  

Examples include: 
-Find one mystery book and record a video predicting what the mystery will be about
-Find one science fiction book and tell why you think it's science fiction.  

Here is a link to the materials I used.

 

The students seemed to really enjoy the activity! Most of the groups did not finish in one class period so we will finish another time.  I love how this activity gets students up and moving and forces them to work together in groups.  We will definitely do more Fliphunts throughout the year!